The Geometry of Journalism

The Geometry of Journalism Zohar Bowen Bronet Supervisor: Professor Carles Roca-Cuberes Final Thesis for the Master’s in International Studies on Media, Power and Difference Department of Communication Universitat Pompeu Fabra 2019/2020 1 Abstract: Scholars from multiple disciplines have been studying various aspects of journalism for nearly a century. The question of newsworthiness, what becomes news and what does not, has always been an area of great interest. While many explanations have been offered, all include varying degrees of psychology and teleology. So far, none have approached the subject using sociologist Donald Black’s framework of pure sociology. The paradigm predicts and explains the behavior of social life with the shape of social space it occurs in, its geometry. Here, I apply Black’s model to the question of newsworthiness to identify the social structures journalism occurs in, and how it behaves within them. I then extend the model to the moral nature of journalism by studying it as a form of social control. The result is a set of theoretical formulations about the behavior of journalism, and a new sociological theory of journalism. Key words: journalism, pure sociology, social geometry, newsworthiness, social control 2 Introduction 3 Pure Sociology and Journalism as a Dependent Variable 4 Social Status 6 Movements of Social Time 6 Journalism as Evaluation 8 Quantifying Journalism 9 PART I Theories of Newsworthiness 11 Events 11 Outlets and Audiences 12 Broader Context and a New Theory 14 Principles of Journalism 15 Journalism and Status 15 Journalism and Itself 22 Journalism and Social Time 24 Journalism and Sports 26 Journalism and Violence 27 Journalism, Politics and War 28 Journalism and Social Time Zones 30 PART II Journalism as Social Control 32 Journalism as a Third Party 33 Unilateral and Bilateral Journalistic Social Control 37 Styles of Journalistic Social Control 38 The Structure of Journalistic Social Control 39 Journalism as Social Control from Below 43 Journalistic Social Control and the Law 45 Downward Social Control of Journalism 48 Journalism and Rebellion 50 Conclusion 51 References 56 Appendix 1 75 Appendix 2 80 Appendix 3 81 3 Introduction The world we inhabit is dynamic, it changes constantly. Something happens somewhere at any given moment, from a new weather pattern to the loss of life, there is little that is static about life on Earth. Ever since humans developed the ability to communicate, we have shared our knowledge of some of these variations in reality with one another (Lamble 2014). The practice of transmitting such observations may range from informal conversation to mass communication, the organized distribution of information by specialized institutions. Journalism is one such institution, and in its purest form can be understood as the production and dissemination of reports on events.1 There are many aspects of journalism worthy of investigation, and many have received a considerable amount already. The forthcoming treatise seeks to identify and expand upon how the paradigm of pure sociology may offer new and potentially valuable insights to this field of study. In essence, the objective is to reconceptualize journalism in the logic of pure sociology, and then order the available facts to produce a general theory of it. In physics, a theory may be understood as “a logical system of ideas that ties together a large number of observations about the real world into a coherent and understandable pattern” (Glashow and Bova 1988, 51). The task at hand then is to analyze a wide range of journalism and literature pertaining to it from different times, places and cultures, and formulate the findings into general proposals accounting for all of it.2 Together, these proposals will form a testable deductive system amounting to a theory of journalism (see Bunge 2009). The topic of newsworthiness is a good starting port for this endeavor. The term refers to any investigation of what journalism is attracted to and why. It has been studied extensively by a large variety of researchers from a substantial range of disciplines, backgrounds and time periods, and has amassed a considerable quantity of literature over the years (Harcup and O’Neill 2017). The phenomenon is also readily observable itself, and may therefore be studied independently of the extant body of knowledge as well. The first part of this paper is devoted to better understanding newsworthiness and its implications using the logic of pure sociology. 1 The purest form of something is when it is the most of itself, uncompromised by anything that is not exactly it (Bourdieu 1996; Latour 2012). In this sense, publicizing a factual description of an event is the highest degree of journalistic purity. The degree of journalism decreases as the quantity and degree of evaluation it contains increases. The nature of evaluations is elaborated later on in the paper. 2 Throughout this paper these proposals are also referred to as principles, formulations or postulates. 4 Journalism has also been found to have a moral nature, it can define things in good or bad terms, and enter or initiate conflicts in various ways. These aspects of journalism also merit explanation from a pure sociology perspective, and are dealt with in the second half. To properly provide an explanation for the considerations above, it is necessary to introduce the paradigm from which journalism will be studied, and journalism’s place within it. Pure Sociology and Journalism as a Dependent Variable The paradigm of pure sociology, developed by sociologist Donald Black, eliminates all elements of psychology embedded in the current field of sociology.3 By removing the psychological component of human behavior, pure sociology does away with all explanations centered on individuals (Black 2000). Instead, it deals strictly with social life itself. Another component of purifying sociology is the removal of teleology, which refers to explaining something as a means to an end. Psychology and sociology are full of assumptions about people, organizations, or societies’ motives, interests, goals, functions or values, which are then used to explain what they do or why they exist. The central issue with this epistemology is that someone or something’s purpose or preference is unobservable, which makes it empirically unknowable. As a result, any theory based on imputed goals or functions is founded on an uncertainty, thus limiting its potential to be applied and falsified, the fundamental attributes of highly scientific theories.4 Although teleology left the physical sciences a long time ago, it remains pervasive in sociology (Black 1995). Black considers teleology to be the “superparadigm” of sociology,5 permeating everything from functionalism to neo-Marxism (ibid.). Instead of a means to an end, pure sociology explains social life using the context in which it occurs, described as its location and direction in social space, known as its social geometry. Similar to dimensions in physical space, social space can be conceptualized as being composed of five quantifiable social dimensions: horizontal, vertical, symbolic, corporate and normative (ibid.).6 These are the observable, quantifiable, independent variables from which formulations about social life are derived. In this paradigm social 3 See Black (2000) Dreams of Pure Sociology for an in depth explanation of how all sociology has been at least somewhat psychological from the beginning. 4 How scientific a theory is depends on its degree of testability, generality, simplicity, validity and originality (Black 1995), also see generally Epistemology of Pure Sociology. 5 See Black Epistemology of Pure Sociology (861-64) for a detailed account of teleology in social science. 6 Black (1995) notes that more dimensions may exist, and his paradigm can accommodate them in the future if appropriate. 5 life is the dependent variable, it varies in relation with the shape and motion of social space, and its direction within it. The horizontal dimension refers to relational and radial locations. The former is measured by the amount of involvement with another person or thing, such as intimacy or time spent together, the latter corresponds to how integrated or marginalized someone is in a given setting like a community or society. The vertical dimension relates to the distribution of wealth and resources, symbolic to the amount of culture, corporate to the level of organization, and normative to the quantity of social control, including how much an entity has been subjected to it in the past.7 The shape of social space is observable and measurable whenever and wherever the relevant social information is available.8 Its size, dimensions and duration are all variable, they are derived from the social characteristics of everyone involved in every aspect of a particular human behavior. Every social attribute contributes to the multidimensional structure of social space (Black 1995). Thus, it is a more useful and widely applicable unit of analysis than those commonly used by sociologists such as societies or groups. Each instance of social life has a specific structure, or social geometry, and as a result pure sociology can be applied everywhere (ibid.). Pure sociology not only quantifies the dimensions of social space, but social life itself. Everything from law, art, medicine, science and ideas can be quantified and studied as dependent variables which behave according to the social structure they occur in. Every structure presents a space in which a certain behavior is more likely to occur. A litigious structure is more conducive to law, a medical structure more conducive to medicine, a violent structure more conducive to violence (ibid.), and a journalistic structure more conducive to journalism.9 The paradigm has been used to explain variations in all of these forms of social life and more by Black and other scholars (Baumgartner 1989; de la Roche 1996; Black 1997; Cooney 2009; Manning 2012; Campbell 2015).10 Recently, it has been applied to the labelling of certain acts of violence as “terrorism” by the news media (Boches 2020).

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